With remarkable access to key figures throughout the armed forces - talking on and off the record - Thomas Ricks gives a gripping account of the entire Iraq fiasco: from its origins in the botched war of 1991 to the ever more disastrous occupation in 2006. Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year One of Time's 10 Best Books of the Year USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year A New York Times Notable Book The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments.
Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.